Live reporting that shows where the month is heading

Leading indicators over lagging ones

Cash flow tells you where a business has been. Conversion rate, average booking value, time to win and lead volume tell you where it is going, because cash flow follows once all of these factors have already closed. A board or an owner that relies on watching cash flow alone will always be looking at historical data. Instead, watching the numbers that produce those results allows enough time to influence the outcome.

Watching lead volume specifically means seeing where a month is going to land while there is still time to act, rather than discovering the answer on the last day of the month when nothing more can be done about it. These insights allow businesses to pivot advertising spend and marketing activity during the month itself, rather than reacting after it closes.

Granular reporting by site, practitioner and channel

A foggy, group-wide total can hide almost anything. An average booking value that holds steady across several sites can mean every site is performing consistently, or it can mean one is doing very well while another is struggling and dragging the average down. Reporting broken down by salesperson, site, practitioner, channel and by individual ad - on the other hand - allows the problem to be traced to its actual source, instead of showing up only as a vague dip in a total.

Live and on-demand reporting

At two or three sites, live and on-demand reporting is convenient. At six or more, it is a necessity, since the number of moving parts a monthly meeting can realistically handle lessens as the group grows, leaving more of the business unmonitored between reports.

A monthly report also forces every question into the shape of whatever the report's author decided to include. This means anything outside of it requires a request, a wait and a follow-up document. Live, interactive reporting can answer a new question the same day it is asked, and therefore changes what kinds of questions people can ask as well as how quickly a problem can be noticed and resolved.

What this looks like when running advertising across several sites

The ability to track the performance of each area of the business properly makes it possible to conduct wider testing across a serious advertising budget, when the alternative has always been a generic lead count that says nothing about which artist, channel or site that spend is working for.

Deciding which direction the budget should move in requires answering those specific questions; something you can't do working from a generic total alone. A group running campaigns across several sites (sometimes centrally and sometimes through individual local accounts) needs their reporting to be granular enough to understand the true picture, as well as keep up.

Proven across twelve locations

Managing a serious advertising budget across that many sites without this kind of reporting underneath it would have been close to unmanageable, since deciding which practitioner's account deserved more spend, which creative had stopped working and which site needed attention were all questions a generic lead count could never have answered.

This is the same reporting approach built for a group running twelve studios, replacing one enormous spreadsheet with live dashboards granular enough to see performance by studio, by artist, by salesperson, by channel and by individual ad, and to see where the month was heading while there was still time to do something about it.